Robert Bushnell Ryan (November 11, 1909 - July 11, 1973) was an American actor who most often portrayed hardened cops and ruthless villains.

Early life

Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, the first child of Mable Arbutus (Bushnell), a secretary, and Timothy Aloysius Ryan, who was from a wealthy family that owned a real estate firm.[3]:p.4 He was of Irish (paternal grandparents from Thurles) and English descent. Ryan was raised Catholic[4] and educated at Loyola Academy.[5] He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1932, having held the school's heavyweight boxing title all four years of his attendance. After graduation, the 6?4" Ryan found employment as a stoker on a ship, a WPA worker, and a ranch hand in Montana.

Although Ryan never appeared in any production of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, he was originally considered for the role of Commodore Matt Decker in the 1967 episode "The Doomsday Machine". Episode author Norman Spinrad reportedly had written the script with Ryan in mind to play Commodore Decker, but Ryan was unavailable, owing to prior commitments. That role subsequently went to William Windom.

Politics

Despite his military service, he also came to share the pacifist views of his wife Jessica, who was a Quaker.

By the mid-1960s, Ryan's political activities included efforts to fight racial discrimination. He served in the cultural division of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and, with Bill Cosby, Robert Culp, Sidney Poitier, and other actors, helped organize the short-lived Artists Help All Blacks.[3]:p.132

Ryan's film work, playing cynical, prejudiced, violent characters, often ran counter to the political causes he embraced. He was a pacifist who starred in war movies, westerns, and violent thrillers. He was an opponent of McCarthyism who appeared in the anti-communist propaganda film I Married a Communist, playing a nefarious communist agent. In socially progressive films such as Crossfire, Bad Day at Black Rock, Odds Against Tomorrow and Executive Action, he played bigoted villains or conspirators. Ryan was often vocal about this dichotomy. At a screening of Odds Against Tomorrow, he appeared before the press to discuss "the problems of an actor like me playing the kind of character that in real life he finds totally despicable."[16]

In the fall of 1951, a progressive school by the name of Oakwood was opened in Jessica and Robert Ryan's backyard, founded by a small group of parents who decided to create a school based on their views of education and child-rearing. Three years later, those parents, including the Ryans, Sidney Harmon and Elizabeth Schappert, Wendy and Ross Cabeen, and Charles and Emilie Haas, bought and built the elementary school campus on Moorpark Street in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley.

Robert and Jessica remained married until her death from cancer in 1972. He died from lung cancer in New York City the following year at age 63.